The Quran—The Miracle Given to the Prophet

standard Arabic, retaining a strong Hebrew influence. After the coming of Islam, Arabs settled in many parts of Africa and Asia where other languages besides Arabic were spoken. However, their intermingling with other races did not affect the Arabic language, which remained in its original state. In the very first century, after the revelation of the Quran, Arabic was exposed to the sort of forces which cause a language to alter radically. This was when Islam spread among various Arab tribes, who began to congregate in major Muslim cities. There was a considerable variety of intonation and accents among the different Arab tribes. So much so that Abu ‘Amr ibn al-’Ula’ was moved to remark that the “Himyar tribe do not speak our language; their vocabulary is quite different from ours.” ‘Umar ibn Khattab once took before the Prophet an Arab he had heard reciting the Quran. The Arab had been pronouncing the words of the Quran in such a strange manner that ‘Umar was unable to make out what part of the Book of God he was reading. The Prophet once spoke to a visiting delegation of some Arab tribe in their dialect. It seemed to ‘Ali as if the Prophet was speaking in a foreign tongue. The main reason for this difference was the variation in accent. For instance, the Banu Tamim, who lived in the eastern part of Najd, could not say the letter ‘j’ (jiim) and used to pronounce it as ‘y’ (Ye) instead. The word for a mosque (masjid), they used to pronounce ‘masyid’, and instead of shajarat’ (trees), they would say’ sharat’. ‘Q’